Fox Reporter Calls Transgender Woman A “Burly Man Wearing A Dress”

June 05, 2013 12:08 pm ET by Carlos Maza

No story about transgender people is too insignificant for Fox News reporter Todd Starnes to cover as a “culture war” horror story, especially if the story gives him the opportunity to use inaccurate and transphobic slurs in his reporting.

In a June 3 article for Fox News Radio, Starnes reported on a Nashville woman who complained after she encountered a transgender woman in a restaurant bathroom. The story included various quotes from the disgruntled woman’s husband, inappropriately referring to the transgender woman as a man and commenting that her presence in the public restroom “poses a safety hazard”:

David Staton, whose wife had the disquieting run-in while eating out at Amerigo, a restaurant in the country music capital, has a simple solution.

“There needs to be some sort of law that says if you are born a man with man-parts, you go to the men’s bathroom,” said Staton. “In a family restaurant, men should go to the men’s room and women should go to the women’s.”

[…]

Staton and his wife were celebrating a date night on Saturday by eating dinner at Amerigo – a regional Italian restaurant chain in Nashville.

Sitting just a few tables away was a group of cross-dressers.

“These guys were well over six feet tall, big burly men in dresses,” he told Fox News. “The whole restaurant noticed them.”

And Staton’s wife especially noticed them after an encounter in the ladies room of the Nashville establishment.

“It was a small restroom and she was waiting for a stall,” he said. “And that’s when she came face to face with a guy well over six feet. She immediately blurted out, ‘Am I in the men’s bathroom?’”

She was not.

Staton said the man went over to the mirror to fix his lipstick and told his wife, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

[…]

He said it poses a safety hazard – especially for families with young daughters.

“No dad or parent should have to wonder – is my little girl going into the women’s bathroom with men in there,” he said. “To have a man in the women’s bathroom is a dangerous thing. That’s just so wrong on so many levels.” [emphasis added]

On Twitter, Starnes continued his hobby of making derogatory remarks about transgender people by echoing Staton’s comments, referring to the transgender woman as a “burly man wearing a dress”:

Starnes’ coverage of the incident is problematic for obvious reasons: inappropriately referring to a transgender person by the wrong gender, using derogatory language, and peddling the baseless “bathroom panic” myth, to name a few.

But it’s also worth noting that no major news outlet aside from Fox has covered the story. Aside from the few right-wing outlets piggy backing off of Starnes’ report, no other serious news publication found the incident worth reporting.

That’s because someone being bothered by the presence of a transgender person isn’t a news story. Nor is it a story when a restaurant voluntarily allows a transgender woman to use a restroom that matches her gender identity (Tennessee’s non-discrimination laws don’t protect transgender people).

Only in the mind of Todd Starnes – a man who’s made it his mission to gin up anti-LGBT sentiment with throwaway “culture war” stories – does this kind of incident qualify as newsworthy.